The All-Terrain Biped (ATB) robot is an unmanned ground vehicle with arms, legs and wheels designed to drive, crawl, walk and manipulate objects for inspection and explosive ordnance disposal tasks. This paper summarizes on-going development of the ATB platform. Control technology for semi-autonomous legged mobility and dual-arm dexterity is described as well as preliminary simulation and hardw...

Within the GIS world, LIDAR becomes an important and convenient data source. Many researchers are developing algorithms to extract a bare-earth model and building boundaries from LIDAR data. This paper presents two different methods for building reconstruction using LIDAR data. The first is a traditional method using filtered LIDAR data and combining cadastral building boundaries data (for exam...

Honeybees offer the potential of using free-flying organisms to search wide areas for the presence of explosives, unexploded ordnance (UXO), and landmines. The use of bees is analogous to dogs for mine clearance, except that a colony of tens of thousands of bees can be trained in about one hour to fly over and search a field for explosives, does not require a leash, and will not set off any min...

A new circle detection algorithm based on the gradient of the intensity image is proposed. The method relies on two conditions. The “gradient angle compatibility condition” constraints the gradient of a given percentage of the pixels belonging to some digital circles of radius in the range of radii to detect to point towards the centre of the circle or in the opposite direction. The “curvature ...

The efficient characterization of sites contaminated with unexploded ordnance (UXO) is necessary prior to returning these sites to the public domain. Characterization plans must be based on an accurate prediction of the UXO distribution. A doubly stochastic Poisson process is proposed as the underlying model controlling the spatial distribution of UXO. This model allows the single parameter (in...